Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party), Stories Untold Productions and James Ley, Sydney Festival, Neilson Nutshell, 16-21 Jan

 

This is a wild rollicking hour of entertainment, the story of a public servant investigating the effects of Great Britain leaving the European Union on Scotland, who finds himself in the middle of the wild world of debauched European sex parties. It comes with a full glossary of gay for the audience (as a practicing homosexual for over 20 years I appreciated it as it also told me about the effects of a fair few party drugs I've never gotten my hands on), an ever-present dance soundtrack, and is enthusiastically narrated by a character called Manpussy (Marc MacKinnon), who comes across like a Scottish Brian Blessed with a filthier vocabulary. 

It's a fast and furious comedy played largely on a bare stage with a few costumes up the back, and is probably the definition of special-interest-theatre, but, dammit, I was definitely interested. It's an act of queer liberation at its most primal, looking at the networks gay men build around them and how these are formed and deformed by how they react to the society around them. 

Lawrence Boothman as the titular Gordon is gorgeously gormless, goofy but also clearly game for anything. Sean Connor as Manpussy's partner in both life and in lust, Cumpig is a good foil, both playing up to Gordon's emerging lusts and endearingly amenable to any of Manpussy's outrageous suggestions.

It's a brisk, wild piece of festival eccentricity and a fine theatrical aperitif to begin the year with.  

The Hello Girls, Heart Strings Theatre in association with Hayes Theatre Company, 10 January -4 February

 One of the challenges of international travel is, occasionally you miss shows that are playing at home. Fortunately, sometimes they come back - such is the case with this production that premiered in Canberra back in September, now back for a season at the Hayes.

And it's certainly worth the trip to catch this cast, a strong ensemble who give the show powerful energy and charm. The subject, the women who were selected by the US Army to work as telephone operators in the European war, is certainly an intriguing and undertold story. There's a lot of good stylish choices in the production...

So why am I not completely enthusiastic about this? Well, largely it's the material - Peter Mills' lyrics and music rarely rise above the serviceable, and the characters mostly lack depth. While it's an unfamiliar story, the style is very familiar - empowerment ballads, the spunky competent women being underestimated then wowing everybody with little more than token resistance. We never really get a sense of anything being much of a challenge or a struggle, and there's never really a doubt that the women will win through (the historic disappointment they had post-war as the army dismissed their work is mostly confined to a footnote). 

There's also a couple of moments of direction I was not in love with - moments when the character singing wasn't given focus so I had to hunt around the stage to find them, and one moment of choreography which felt distinctly tacky. For the most part, I find it a professionally staged production of a show that is a perfectly okay Theatre In Education piece but probably shouldn't be the work of a major music theatre company looking to be the cutting edge of the form. 

Again, I enjoyed the work of the cast quite a lot. Rhianna McCourt leads with power as Grace, Kira Leiva gives good sneaky sidekick as Suzanne, Nikola Gucciardo is loveable as the naive Helen, Kaitlin Nihill is powerful as the uberfrench Louise, Joel Hutchings is toughly stern as Riser, Matthew Hearne is playful and charming as Matterson and David Hooley gives strong authority as General Pershing. But there's only so much they can do with material which is distinctly mid-level. 

Tiddas, Belvoir Street Theatre and Sydney Festival, Upstairs theatre, 12 Jan-28 Jan

 Tiddas is the story of five friends who gather to form a book group - mostly indigenous and mostly born in Mudgee but now living in Brisbane, they have professional and personal challenges that come out during the course of the various meetings as they read, reflect, and contemplate It's a warm piece, but it doesn't shy away from raising some of the challenges and tensions that can come with long-term friendships, as long-untold thoughts simmer in the background until they come out at inopportune moments. The six women, all in their early 40s, confront issues of career, family, and their obligations as indigenous women to serve their culture. 

Anita Heiss has based the script on her own novel, and there's a slight sense that the 90 minutes duration play is rushing through the incidents a little - some of the issues presented feel only lightly explored. In particular, there's a strong confrontation partway through where it feels like non-indigenous audience allies are being confronted with how performative a lot of allyship can be ... but this is allowed to dribble away with the issues hidden behind a personal failing rather than a wider social problem. The play premiered at Brisbane's LaBoite in 2022, based on a novel from  2014, and in this revival, there's obviously been an update to reference the Ocboer 2023 referendum ... but it remains just a reference rather than something really used to pursue a deeper and more urgent dramatic question about how aboriginal engagement with the white populace is even possible.  Still, the play isn't really written to deal with something of that size ... but for the seconds it's referenced, it feels like a much bigger play than it ultimately is. 

There's reasonably strong performances across the cast - Louise Brehmer's blowsy, brash Nadine; Lara Croydon's opinionated, confident Izzy; Jade Lomas-Roman's warm, emotional Xanthe; Anna McMahon's growing confidence as Veronica; and Perry Mooney's confident Ellen. Co-director Roxanne McDonald  does double duty as the somewhat underwritten Nan (who's basically there more as a visual presence for a lot of the show) and the brief cameo as Mum, and Sean Dow plays 5 different roles as a range of different men in the women's lives, easily differentiated through performance and bearing. 

Zoe Rouse's set design is beautiful though it doesn't always allow for the smoothest of scene transitions, and technically this is finely done.

My main issue is that this really isn't stretching too far beyond the "nice night out" stereotype - it's distinctly unambitious theatre, which is not really what I come to Belvoir for. Belvoir's commitment to indigenous drama has been a proud feature of their work, but I think that drama needs to be unafraid to engage in the harder questions that come up rather than just offer comfort viewing.